Every artery. Every vein. Every ventricle and atrium. A perfect 3-D image in living color, slowly rotating on the screen like a runway model showing off her angles.

“Now watch this.” With a few clicks of her mouse, CT technician Melissa Stephenson took me on a trip down one of my main coronary arteries, like a virtual roller coaster ride.

The most amazing thing was it took less than half a heartbeat to capture all these incredible images.

Michigan’s first Flash CT Scanner is up and running at the newly opened Premier Imaging Center, inside the Mid-Michigan Cardiology Associates building, 1165 S. Linden Road in Flint Township.

It’s the fifth in the entire nation, and the only one outside of a hospital setting such as the Mayo Clinic, which has two.

My demonstration scan was an “up close and personal” look at the new diagnostic technology that promises to lower patients’ radiation exposure, provide an easier experience for children and the elderly, and reduce the need for expensive and more medically risky diagnostic procedures like heart catherizations. It can be used for a wide variety of diagnostic applications.

The whole procedure — from entering the slightly chilly scan room to my final post-scan blood pressure reading — was less than a half-hour.

I was actually lying down on the scanner table for about 10 minutes, while the nurse hooked me up to a heart monitor and started an IV line for the iodine dye that adds sharper contrast to the x-ray images.

The scan itself was a matter of holding one slightly shallow breath while the table slid me back and forth through the scanner’s doughnut-shaped ring. The new Flash scanner is so fast, in fact, that it could’ve done the same thing even for a child or elderly patient unable to hold their breath.

“With this technology, we don’t have to sedate children, which is what we normally have to do for a CT scan,” said Dr. Ethiraj Raj, who launched Premier Imaging with fellow interventional cardiologist Dr. Mohammadali Amlani. “We can take pictures of any part of the body in a fraction of a second.”

Even more importantly, the high speed means patients are getting a much lower dose of radiation than in traditional scanners.

“When you can reduce the radiation to less than a tenth the conventional CT dose, you are reducing the risk of future cancers. In younger patients especially, that is critical,” said Amlani.

It can also help lower health care costs.

The Flash CT Scan’s high rate of accuracy — 97 percent for scans of coronary arteries — means far fewer patients will have unnecessary heart catherizations, with all the costs and medical risks inherent in any invasive procedure.

“If you had a heart catherization done to diagnose coronary artery disease, it would cost $9,000 to $15,000 plus the risk of a stroke or heart attack during the procedure, plus you’d be in the hospital six to eight hours, and then off work two to three days,” said Amlani. “With this CT scanner, you can get images just as good for less than $1,000 and you’re in and out in less than an hour.”

The scan gave my heart a clean bill of health — a nice thing to hear, given a family history of coronary artery disease that’s claimed several relatives and put my own dad through a quadruple bypass.

In Bill McCulloch’s case, that half-a-heartbeat scan might have saved his life.

McCulloch, 75, of Swartz Creek, was scheduled to undergo surgery to clear a blocked carotid artery on the left side of his neck.

It just so happened that McCulloch’s daughter, Teresa Stilson, is the director of marketing for Premier Imaging. When the doctors offered a free introductory scan to their employees’ families, Stilson urged her dad to come in.

It turned out that an artery in McCulloch’s heart was 70 percent blocked, despite the fact he had no chest pains or other telltale symptoms. Once Raj saw the scan, he immediately scheduled a catherization to open the heart blockage.

“If he’d not had that done first, he had a very high chance of having a heart attack during the carotid procedure,” said Stilson. “Thank God he volunteered to have the scan.”

Two days later, doctors successfully cleared the blocked carotid artery too. McCulloch was back home the next afternoon.

“There’s nothing to the scan. Three or four minutes and you’re out of there. You don’t even have to take your clothes off,” said McCulloch. “They tell me I was a walking time bomb but I had no idea. I figured it was just old age.”

McCulloch is still nursing the stitches in the side of his neck where surgeons operated on his carotid artery, and he’s now taking an anti-clot medication and daily aspirin. But the only thing he’s worried about now is getting packed in time for he and wife Willodean to fly to Florida, where he’s looking forward to his first round of winter golf.